On-Chip bus serialization method for low-power communications

Abstract

One of the critical issues in on-chip serial communications is increased power consumption. In general, serial communications tend to dissipate more energy than parallel communications due to bit multiplexing. This paper proposes a low-power bus serialization method. This encodes bus signals prior to serialization so that they are converted into signals that do not greatly increase in transition frequency when serialized. It significantly reduces the frequency by making the best use of word-to-word and bit-by-bit correlations presented in original parallel signals. The method is applied to the revision of an MPEG-4 processor, and the simulation results show that the proposed method surpasses the existing one. In addition, it is cost-effective when implemented as a hardware circuit since its algorithm is very simple. © 2010 ETRI.